PLANTAGENET -- On the day the 2008 Governor General Awards for Literacy were announced in Montreal, Roger Caron was here -- pitching back-and-forth in his wheelchair, his face unshaven, his shirt inside-out, pyjama bottoms covering his scrawny bruised legs, mismatched socks on his feet, and a toe sticking out of a hole in one.

He was having a good day. His mind was almost working.

Here is a long way from there. Here is the Quatre Saisons retirement home, a squat building at the end of a dead-end road on the outskirts of this small Franco-Ontario farming community, some 60 km east of Ottawa, The majority of its clients are brain addled or physically impaired -- and most often both.

Lost souls with blank stares live here. A man lies wailing in a corner; a woman wearing a plastic crown wants a hug; another crawls across the floor on her hands and knees.

This is Roger Caron's here.

There, by contrast, was the day back in 1978 when Roger Caron walked into Rideau Hall in Ottawa, buff and chiselled, to accept the Governor General's Award for non-fiction, his contribution to Canadian literature entitled Go-Boy! Memories of a Life Behind Bars.

Famed Canadian author Alice Munro had won the fiction category that same year for her Who Do You Think You Are?

Roger Caron knew who he was then. He was 39 years old, Canada's most famous bank robber and escape artist and, with 23 of those years having been spent in prison, he had crossed a personal Rubicon to become a Can-Lit celebrity. He was the toast of the gown and black tie crowd.

Prison stripes, however, are often impossible to change, and Roger Caron knew no other life beyond crime and drugs.

And he was destined to return to it, as sure as if it were written on the wall.

Today, Roger Caron is 70. He has advanced Parkinson's disease and, according to Subhash Chadha, manager of Quatre Saisons, dementia is now quickly winning the battle over Caron's once fertile mind.

"It is sad," says Chadha. "I feel sorry for him. He is one of my favourite people here, but it could happen to us all. Growing old is not always kind."

Back in March 2004, the Toronto Police holdup squad had Roger Caron transferred from a prison cell in Ottawa where he was doing time for gun possession and, once safely behind bars at the Maplehurst super-jail, they paid him a visit and charged him with 14 Toronto-area bank heists, as well as the robbery of a local Loblaws -- a slough-off, argued Caron, of cases the cops couldn't solve.

"Not once have I ever been a 'beggar bandit' ... not ever," Caron told me after those charges were laid.

"Beggar bandits are the ones who hand notes to tellers. When I rob a bank, there are no notes. The gun's out, everyone is told to hit the floor, and I'm over the counter bagging up the cash," he said.

"Now they're trying to hang 'beggar bandit' charges on me, just so they can clear up their case files."

And Caron was right, at least to within the saving grace of a reasonable doubt.

A myriad of conflicting witness descriptions of a robber that Toronto Police insisted all somehow matched the aged and ailing Caron was enough to get him acquitted.

Almost a year after his arrest, Ontario Court Judge John Moore tossed all five counts of robbery against Caron -- 10 charges had already been withdrawn by the Crown -- saying that "many miscarriages of justice" have resulted when a case relies solely on witness evidence.

"Mr. Caron may or may not be responsible for some, most or all of the robberies," the judge said, "But at the end of the day, he's entitled to be acquitted because of the inherent frailties of the identification evidence."

And, with that, Caron was hauled back to Ottawa to serve out his remaining time on the gun charge, and then, following his release, he returned to the town of Barry's Bay and the small house on Beirnacki St. that he shared with his common-law spouse, Barbara.

It was Barbara, in fact, who told me of Quatre Saisons. "He's no longer a part of my life," she said.

The public guardian, administered through the Ontario office of the attorney general, now takes care of Roger Caron's life and financial affairs. He is a welfare case. Whatever money he once had is gone.

"He has been with us for about a year. Right now, he is behind two months in his fees," said the Quatre Saisons' Subhash Chadha. "But that's being sorted out. There is no way he will be told to leave."

It is in the early afternoon when I arrive at Quatre Saisons. Lunch had just been cleared. The sign said a hamburger and macaroni and cheese had been served.

Roger Caron does not recognize me, even though we have spent hours and hours together over the years. Even though it was me he called collect from Maplehurst.

Even though I had been to his home many times, and had written about him often, especially when he found himself in a new jam.

We go to the sparse room he shares with a man who is forever sleeping. I push him in his wheelchair.

He pulls up his pyjamas and shows me the burns on his knees, and the scrapes on his shins, all self-inflicted by his stubborn refusal to believe he can no longer walk.

His whole body shakes. Balance has abandoned him.

"I'd like to write another book," he says. "But it takes me forever to type a single line and, when I do, the type gets smaller and smaller and hard to see.

"Besides, no one can get my typewriter to work."

The typewriter is old, and covered in dust. Plug it in, however, and it does come to life.

"How did you do that?" Caron asks.

Two hours go by, most of it filled with silence, and some of it filled with Roger Caron's stream of unconscience.

When he talks, his mind does not always connect the dots or fire on all cylinders. The wires are eroding.

And so, one minute he is back in prison, and the next he is talking about how he escaped to go fishing down by the South Nation River at the bottom of the cul-de-sac where Quatre Saisons finds itself at the end of Station St.